It is lastly a peculiar characteristic of the beauty of Nature that it should excite or exercise a harmonious influence over our emotional life. A mood of this kind is aroused by the stillness of moonlight, the peace of a valley, through which some brook or other meanders, the sublimity of the immeasurable storm-tossed sea, the tranquil depth of the star-strewn heavens. But the significant factor in this case is not so much to be found in the objects as in the peculiar moods they arouse in our feelings and affections. On analogous grounds we attribute beauty to animals, when the expression of their life directly suggests human qualities, such as courage, strength, cunning, good nature, and the rest. Such, no doubt, in one aspect of it, truly expresses the nature of the animals themselves; but there is also our own conception of its affinity to ourselves, and the mood in which we receive it.
(_c_) However much animal life, as the culminating point of natural beauty, unfolds its freest expression as a living principle, it is comparatively narrow in its range and subject to very limited qualities. The circle of such existence is a strait one; and in this the predominant interests are those of the satisfaction of natural instincts such as hunger and sex-attraction. Soul-life, regarded as the inward principle expressed through external figure, is poor, abstract, and empty of content. Add to this the consideration that this inward is not manifested at all as _inward._ The soul in its essential substance is not revealed by the life of Nature; it is, in fact, the determining characteristic of Nature that its soul remains shut in itself, does not, in other words, proclaim itself in its ideality. As already pointed out, the soul of an animal is not this ideal unity _self-acknowledged._ If it were otherwise we should have the manifestation of such personality brought home to others. Only in the self-conscious Ego do we find the ideal in its simplest terms, which is itself an ideal medium to itself, knows itself as this simple unity, and thereby endows itself with a reality, which is not limited to bodily and sensuous form, but is itself of an ideal character. Here, for the first time, reality is in possession of a form adequate to the notion; or rather the notion sets itself up as its own opposite, makes itself objectively real and finds its own realization in that objectivity. The animal life, on the contrary, is only _potentially_ such a unity as that in which reality as bodily form is other than the ideal unity of soul. In self-consciousness we have this unity realized, whose opposing factors are constituent elements of one transparent ideality. And it is as this concrete totality of self-consciousness that the Ego is manifested to others. The forms of animal life merely enable us through imaginative perception to divine the soul's existence. Such only possess the troubled semblance of a soul, betrayed to us through the breath or exhalement which permeates the whole, gives some unity to all the members, and reveals in the entire instinctive life the first germs of an independent character. Herein lies the primary defect of the beauty of Nature, even when taken at its point of culminating form: and it is precisely this defect which will introduce us to the necessity of _the Ideal_ as the beauty of art. But before we consider at length the nature of this Ideal, there are two determinations involved as the most immediate result of this inherent defect in natural beauty, which invite our attention.